The Empire Never Ended

We reproduce our past not as memory, but as action. We act it out. Acting it out is, for some of us, our most vivid way of remembering.

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“There is a certain warning Freud imparted to humankind about our behaviour that is Delphic in its ambiguity. Fatalists love this warning beacuse it proves that humans are little more than what Pavlov supposed. Optimists usually don’t read a lot of psychoanalytic theory so they may not have the opportunity to discover the political hope that Freud’s warning confirms. To paraphrase Freud it asserts that: ‘We reproduce our past not as memory, but as action. We act it out. Acting it out is, for some of us, our most vivid way of remembering.'”